- Meet -

The Corona Disaster has had a profound impact on the activities of the Chor Mai, and we have spent many days searching for ways to continue singing. Under such circumstances, we have decided, for the first time, to recruit friends to sing with us for our 23rd concert.

"Yaramaika."

We wondered if there would be anyone who would respond to our small appeal. We were very anxious, but thankfully, we gathered together wonderful singers with hearts from all over the world.

When we meet people from all over the world, a new world opens up.
Something new is born.

Chor Mai, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary this year, will bring to life on stage the "chamber ensemble" that it has valued most since its inception, together with its new, irreplaceable friends and powerful music.

"Yaramaika" means "Won't you join us? It is also the origin of the name of the choir.

October 23, 2022 at Matsumoto City Music Culture Hall (The Harmony Hall).
Music Director: Fumiya Amamori
Piano Tomoko Hirabayashi
4th stage conductor: Naoyoshi Okuhara (Choir Mai-dan member)

1st stage
Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968)
Requiem

Composer Ildebrando Pizzetti was a highly respected figure in 20th century Italian music, having served as director of the country's major conservatories. The interest in medieval Renaissance music and music theory that sprouted under his teacher's influence during his impressionable years continued throughout Pizzettoi's life, as is well demonstrated in the "Requiem," composed in 1922-23 and dedicated to the death of his wife. The "Requiem" begins with a recitation of Gregorian chant and combines church melody and refined harmony, with perfect fifths and sustained notes used throughout to create a solemn, rigorous sound. The Requiem, with its impressive polyphony and fugue, is followed by the Dies irae, in which the solemn Gregorian chant is overlaid with impressive obbligato reminiscent of the medieval vowel chanting technique, sine littera. On the other hand, the dramatic development of the latter half, which is divided into eight parts, seems to reveal the emotions of human beings who shudder before the judgment of God. The following Sanctus is a retrospective of the double choral style of the Italian Renaissance, which flourished around St. Mark's Basilica in Venice in the 16th century, and is a magnificent piece with three groups of four-part chorus singing in homophony. The five pieces, including the peaceful Agnus Dei and the dramatic Libera me, which expresses an earnest prayer in music, are Pizzettoi's choral masterpiece, which has been likened to "the sound of the Renaissance revived in the 20th century. Although the work is often performed by a large chorus, it was originally written with 12 soloists in mind, and today 19 singers will perform it as if it were a premiere. For a long time, the choir's early repertoire consisted mainly of vocal works from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Today's performance is dedicated to the two wonderful singers, now deceased, who have continued to support Mai since its early days and have created its sound.

References
Minoru Nishihara, Composers Who Confronted God: A Modern History of the Mass and Requiem, 1745-1945 (2022, Ongaku no Tomo Sha)
Taro Inoue, "History of Requiem" (1999, Kawade Bunko)


2. R. Schumann Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Surely the sun shines So wahr die Sonne scheinet Op.101-8
Schumann composed three song cycles in 1849. Spanisches Liederspiel Op.74 (Spanish Song Play) and Spanische Liebeslieder Op.138 (Spanish Love Song), both on poems by Emanuel Geibel, and the Minnespiel, Op.101 (Love Flirtation), based on a poem by Schumann's favorite poet, Friedrich Rückert. The pieces are interspersed with a variety of solos, duets, and quartets, and Schumann's mature compositional technique and exquisite brushwork are fascinating. Surely the Sun Shines" is a quartet quartet that performs the finale of Minnespiel Op.101.

3. J. Brahms Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Longing Sehnsucht Op.112-1
Brahms was one of the most famous composers of the German Romantic period, and left more than 300 vocal works. He wrote more than 300 vocal works, including "Love Songs," Op. 52 and "Gypsy Songs," Op. 103, as well as many masterpieces for chorus. The piece we will perform here, "Longing," is the first piece from the collection "Six Quartets," Op. 112 (published in 1891), which was published in his later years, and was composed to a poem by Coogler with a resigned tone. The work is striking for its chromatic progression and harmonic color, as if sewn through the membrane of memory, and for its distinctly German shading.

4. C. MONTEVERDI Claudio MONTEVERDI (1567-1643)
From the Madrigale Collection, Vol. 4
To the stars he confided Sfogava con le stelle
I am a young girl Io mi son giovinetta
Born in Cremona, northern Italy, Monteverdi was one of Italy's most famous musicians, having been a court musician in Mantova for 22 years from 1590. At the height of his powers in traditional madrigale, he advocated the "second method" (the traditional method was called the first) of boldly expressing words and sorrowful emotions through dissonance and chromatic writing, and in the fourth volume of his Madrigale Collection he successfully combined the traditional Renaissance style with the "second method. Later, he would develop his dramatic expression and devote himself to baroque madrigale in the form of solo and polyphonic singing with bass accompaniment, which is quite different from traditional madrigale, and has had a great influence on the development of baroque music and opera in later generations. We have been fascinated by Monteverdi's madrigale works and have sung them many times over the past 20 years. Today, the entire ensemble of performers will present two pieces from the fourth volume of the Madrigale Collection, "To the Stars He Confided" and "I am a Young Girl".

3rd stage
Medley for Mixed Chorus "Crossing Borders Anthem -European Shoka Dressed in Japanese
Arranged by Takatomi Nobunaga

As a side story project of the "Anthem Project" to sing and record all the world's national anthems in their original languages for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, composer Takatomi Nobunaga has created "Seven Anthem Medleys: World Travel of Songs", a medley of beloved songs from different regions. Today's performance of "Crossing Borders Anthems" is the sixth in the series, "Continental Europe II Medley. The dictionary defines an anthem as "a hymn as a symbol of a particular group," and includes hymns, national anthems of countries around the world, and beloved songs that are familiar in many countries, such as the second national anthem. Since the Meiji period (1868-1912), some melodies have reached Japan across the sea for various reasons and have been given Japanese lyrics. Composer Takatomi Nobunaga has connected these melodies and knitted them together into one large medley. The setting is Japan. The main melody is from Europe. Western music education in Japan began as part of the modernization policy of the new Meiji government during the Meiji period (1868-1912), when Japan was forced to confront the "world" for the first time as a "nation. It can be said that this was one of the desperate attempts of the new Meiji government to catch up with the cultural level of the West in order to repel the invasion of Western powers and to compete on equal terms with them as an independent nation. The teaching materials were "translated shoka," Japanese lyrics adapted from Western folk songs and hymns. The new Meiji government hoped that by creating "shoka" that could be sung by the entire nation, a sense of national identity as "Japanese" would sprout among the people of the nation. It can be said that Western music, which many Japanese first came into contact with, was a manufactured anthem, with Japanese lyrics added to the Western anthems that came to Japan against this historical backdrop. Of the nine shoka selected for this work, the first four and the final song "Hani no Yado" were introduced to Japan as translated shoka during the Meiji period (1868-1912) and were sung by school children. As the era progressed toward the rise of imperialism and the invasion of Japan, the translated shoka were transformed into military songs and used to raise war spirits. The first song, "Mimitoware" became the military song "Shogun," and the original lyrics were forgotten in educational settings as the song was sung at playgroups. The ever-changing form of "shoka" in the medley reveals the foolishness and sadness of human beings who are driven to war as if swept away by the current of the times. On the other hand, those of us who come into contact with this medley are reminded that "songs are always with the people who sing them. When we sing the translated version of "Miimatomare" today, we feel the passion of the young men and women of the Music Bureau of the Ministry of Education who attempted to translate and write the lyrics, struggling with unfamiliar Western scales and the original songs with a sense of pride in the Japanese climate and culture they had inherited, and with a desire to leave a bright future for the children of Japan. At the same time, we can picture the children of that time who were amazed at the Western scales and melodies they encountered for the first time, and learned and sang the songs by imitation, recalling the beauty of the Japanese spring cities mentioned in the lyrics. The fifth song in the medley, "Taneyamagahara," is based on the famous melody at the beginning of the second movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World," to which Kenji Miyazawa added his own lyrics. Kenji, who lived in the provincial city of Morioka during the Meiji period (1868-1912), was so absorbed in Western music that he threw away his meager salary to buy records and organize record-appreciation parties, and even founded his own orchestra. He and his students were burning with the ideal of elevating the daily lives of farmers to the heights of art, and in the opening of the second movement of "New World," Kenji may have seen a scene of the earth, which he cultivated with sweat on his forehead, being filled with dawn light. This is Western music sung in Japanese, born from the pure emotion of a young Japanese man who was exposed to the beauty of Western music. The song spread across countries, eras, and positions, and was loved by people all over the world. Songs that still spill from our lips even after we have lost everything. Among the "translated shoka," which should have been a custom-made anthem, there were indeed "anthems" like "Hani no Yado" that connected with the deepest part of Japanese people's hearts to the extent that they forgot that the original song was from a foreign country.
As I travel through time with Mr. Nobunaga's medley, I feel as if I am witnessing the moment when, at the end of the journey, the beautiful melody that crossed the sea with people's thoughts and reached Japan is handed over to various people, and one day becomes our true anthem. What is home? What is a country? We selected this piece before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We are shocked and saddened by the fact that the same past reality depicted in this work, which strongly evokes the sadness and emptiness of war, has now been triggered in our world. It is precisely because it is now that I want to sing it with great care and ask it a question.

1. France "Look Out" (1752)
The original song was written and composed by French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1752, and was imported to Japan as the hymn "Green Will" after being revised. In modern times, it is popularly known as the children's song "Musumu de hiraite" (Muscle and Flute). The lyrics were composed by Kiyohiro Shibata and Sen'ei Inagaki of the Music Department of the Ministry of Education based on waka poems in the Kokin Waka Shu, and were published in 1881 as the 13th song in Shogaku Shoka Shu Hatsuhen, the first Japanese music textbook to use five-line notation.

2. German "Kasumi ka Kumo ka
The Japanese lyrics were created during the development of teaching materials by the Music Department of the Ministry of Education, and were published in 1883 in "Shogaku Shoka-shu Dai-nihen" (Shogaku Shoka Collection, Second Edition). The original song, "Alle Vögel sind schon da (Little birds are coming)" is a German children's song about the joys of spring. Although both the shoka and the original are sung about the spring season, only birds appear in the original lyrics, whereas the translated shoka adds the spring season words "haze" and "flower" and a specific spring bird called "warbler" to successfully depict a Japanese-style spring scene. The lyricist, Kabe Iwao, was a court poet who worked at the Imperial Poetry Office and was involved in the selection of lyrics for the Music Office from 1881.

3. German "Hometown Song" (Songs of Leaving Home)
Published in 1913 in "New Shoka No.5" (New Shoka No.5). Around this time, original Japanese shoka by corporate composers were being published one after another, but the supply of translated shoka was also continuing. The origin of the original German song "Der letzte Abend (The Last Night)" is unknown, and some say that it originated from a folk song in the Franconian region of south-central Germany. The lyrics were written by Kazumasa Yoshimaru, a Japanese lyricist, literary scholar, and educator known for "Early Spring Song.

4. "Homeland Sky," Scotland (England)
The original song is "Coming'Thro'the Rye (When We Meet in the Rye)" with lyrics by Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet. The original song is a playful song about love, but the Japanese lyrics are a song about longing for one's hometown. The lyricist, Owada Kenki, was a poet, lyricist, and scholar of Japanese literature. He was a gifted young man who was well versed in the Four Books and Five Classics, and studied at Hiroshima University for three years around the age of 20, where he also studied English. He is also known as the lyricist of "Railroad Shoka" and "Aoba no Fue.

5. Czech "Taneyamagahara (Ieji)" (2nd movement from "From the New World")
The original is the second movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World. Famous Japanese lyrics include Keizo Horiuchi's "Tohki Yama ni Hibi ga Ochireta" (The Sun Goes Down Over the Distant Mountains), but Kenji Miyazawa was the first to add Japanese lyrics to this melody. Taneyamagahara is a highland area in Oshu City, Iwate Prefecture, and was the setting for "Night on the Galactic Railroad" and "Kaze no Matasaburo".

6. Northern Ireland (United Kingdom) "Song of Londonderry
Northern Ireland is the British territory in the northeastern part of the island of Ireland. Londonderry" is the name of the second largest city in Northern Ireland. The melody is a local folk song that has been treated as the de facto national anthem in British Northern Ireland and is popular among Irish immigrants. There are several Japanese versions of the song, but the most famous in Japan is that of Lordichi Tsugawa, who wrote the lyrics as a gift to his child who was leaving home. Tsugawa is a former pastor who is also known as the person who introduced Foster to Japan. He left a significant mark on the popularization of choral music in Japan.

7. Russian "Lights
Russian poet Mikhail Isakovsky published this poem during World War II. It is a lament for love torn apart by war and longing for home. The lyrics, which were common throughout Russia at the time, captured the hearts of the Russian public, and many melodies were spontaneously added to the song. In Japan, the song came to be widely sung during the "Utagoe Movement" that became popular in the postwar 1950s. Mori Okuji brought back to Japan the Russian folk songs he had learned during his Siberian internment and translated them into Japanese himself. With the desire to spread Russian songs and dances in Japan, he formed the "Music and Dance Company Katusha. Many of the Russian folk songs he released, such as "A Week," "Lights," and "Troika," spread throughout Japan through the "singing movement" that became popular in the 1950s, and are still loved by many Japanese people.

8. French "March (a variant of "Look over me")
This is an example of the conversion of a shoka into a military song, published in 1895 in the military song collection "Daito Gunkan" ("Daito Military Song"). Against the backdrop of the rise of imperialism, the era was pushing toward the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, involving music education. The song was sung to children in a playful manner, accompanied by physical activities. The lyricist, Torii Kappaya, is known as the lyricist of "Hakone Hachiri" composed by Taki Rentaro. After studying French at the University of Southern Japan and the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages, he came to Japan to study music under Mason. Later, he worked as a music inspector for the Ministry of Education.

9. England (England) "Haniwa no Yado
Composed by an English bishop in 1823 and translated into Japanese by Satomi Yoshi, it was published in "Chuugakushoka-shu" in 1889 during the Meiji Era. The original lyrics of "Home, Sweet Home" were written by J.H. Payne in the U.S. It was sung in the opera "The Maiden of Milan" first performed in 1823. The author of the Japanese lyrics, Yoshiyoshi Satomi, also translated the lyrics to "Yarde no Senkusa" and "Saijo (original song by Annie Laurie)" from the shoka collection for elementary school. The melody of "Nostalgic Home," loved all over the world, is accompanied by seasonal words that have been handed down through the generations in Japan, such as spring flowers, birds, the autumn moon, and the sound of insects, and is connected not to "someone's home" in a distant foreign country, but to "my home" in the Japanese landscape.

Main References
Takatomi Nobunaga, "Koshikai suru anthem" (Transcending Borders Anthems) (Zen Ongaku Publishing Co., Ltd.), commentary
Sato, Keiji, "Honyaku Shoka to Kokumin Keisei: Meiji-era Elementary School Music Textbooks no Kenkyu (Study of Elementary School Music Textbooks in the Meiji Era)," (Kyushu University Press, 2019)
Yasuto Okunaka, Kokka to Ongaku: Izawa Shuji ga mezashita Nihon Kindai (The State and Music: Japanese Modernity Aimed for by Izawa Shuji) (Shunju-sha, 2008)
More Three Classics vol.267 "Schubert and German Lieder" p.71 "Russian Folk Songs Favored by the Japanese
Ongaku Torikake (ed.), Shogakko Shoka Shu. Hatsuhen - Dai-nihen" (1881-1884) from the Digital Collections of the National Diet Library.
Hanamaki City website, "Kenji and Farmers," https://www.city.hanamaki.iwate.jp/miyazawakenji/about_kenji/1003948.html


4th stage
Takatomi Nobunaga(1971- )
Song for Mixed Chorus and Piano "A Song for My Lips

Over the course of more than 100 years, words have also crossed the sea. Song for my lips" was first performed in 2007. Originally written for male chorus and piano, it was premiered in 2005. The texts are by Hesse, Arendt, Rilke, and Fleischlien, all poets who lived in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Their works are well known not only in Europe but also in faraway Japan, where they are translated by many famous writers. The lyrics are in both German and Japanese. At the beginning of the score, Mr. Nobunaga says, "My aim was to use the German language to create a romantic sound image and the native language to evoke a deep and nostalgic emotion. In the introduction to the male version, Mr. Nobunaga states, "It takes a lot of courage to create romantic music," and "The reason I wanted to use romantic expression was because I wanted to write a song that would enrich the dry times of the present age. Each of the four songs in the collection has its own independent story, but at the same time, Nobunaga's music sublimates the loose connections between the texts into a larger narrative. It could even be heard as a story of a young man's longing for the other side of the sea, his departure, meeting, parting, and being tossed about by the currents of the times, tormented by anxiety and loneliness, but holding on to his longing to the very end. One cannot help but feel a bright and positive wish, as if blessing the singers and listeners as they embark on a journey into the next 100 years.

1. White Clouds -Weiße Wolken
Hesse was born into a family that was broadly open to the Orient. His father was a Russian-born Swiss missionary, and his mother was an Indian-born Swiss of German descent. His cousin Wilhelm Gundert was a Japanologist who lived in Japan for nearly 30 years. Gundelt and Hesse were close in age and seem to have been very close to each other. During World War I, Hesse rebelled against the trend of denying the culture of the enemy and was denounced by the German authorities. However, Hesse continued to pursue Eastern thought, and in 1922 he wrote a novel, Siddhartha, which took its name from the Buddha before his ordination. Weiße Wolken was written in Hesse's early 20s. When we think of Hesse's path in the aftermath of the war, or when we look out over the world today, "a wanderer away from home" seems a cold and lonely phrase. However, in the past and in the present, songs have been spun to transmit feelings to the next generation. Forgotten, reshaped, crossing oceans, and traveling around the world. The words of the young Hesse, such as "sun," "sea," and "wind," are a view of the expanding future. The lyrics begin with the original German poem, which is then interspersed with Japanese. The piano accompaniment may be a drifting cloud itself, or the wind that carries it across the sea. In the dazzling harmony, the two words echo each other, connecting the young Hesse with us, the singers of this song.

2. forget-me-not - Vergißmeinnicht
The name "Vergißmeinnicht" comes from a medieval German legend of a tragic love story: Rudolph, a knight, tries to gather a single flower from the Danube for his lover Bertha. However, Rudolph falls off the shore and is swept away to his death. At the last moment, he tosses the flower to Bertha and shouts "Vergiß-mein-nicht! In 1885, the Austrian poet Arendt, along with 23 other young poets, wrote this poem in his collection of lyrics, "The Temperament of the Modern Poet. The translation by Ueda Toshi, written entirely in hiragana in the Japanese syllabary "Yamato Kotoba" (5-7), flows silently in waves through our hearts. The medieval tale is told to us in our mother tongue in a fresh way over time and across the country in four-line verses. This is the only one of the four pieces that is spoken in Japanese. Mr. Nobunaga is a composer with a remarkable sense of color, and the colors of the flowers of wasenagusa are given different hues when they are spoken in the "Yamato dialect" or in German. Mizu Asagi" is sung in a fragile melody, and gives a faint glimpse into the sorrow of a girl who has lost someone she loves to the "water. Blau" shows complex and vivid blue tones, as if looking up to the depths of a river or the sky. In the score, the symbolic C note is written continuously to separate the two, and it continues to echo like a pretty flower blooming by the riverside.


3. Autumn -Herbst
Rilke was an artist who was interested in sculpture, and was known to be an admirer of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. In 1900, Rilke began to associate with a number of young artists, including Clara, the sculptor who would later become his wife. Interested in the methods of sculpture, he attempted to incorporate them into his poetry. He departed from the lyrical style of his earlier works and began to explore the technique of observing the "forms" of things and shaping them with words. In August 1902, Rilke accepted a commission to write a review of Rodin, the sculptor of the day, and moved to Paris, where Rodin was living. The following year, Rilke completed his "Treatise on Rodin," but his interest in Rodin did not end there, and he continued to frequent Rodin's studio, serving for a time as his private secretary. Rilke's enthusiasm for Rodin and his sculptural techniques is evident in his attempts to find new techniques in his own poetry. Herbst is a poem written in the first autumn after moving to Paris. In "Die Blätter," Rilke finds a "Hand," perhaps a leaf falling from a roadside tree. Its fall comes to all things tangible, and we, even the earth on which we stand, are confronted with its lonely demise. Who, then, is the "One" who gently accepts it with both hands? Rilke believed that Rodin observed things deeply and eventually formed them with firm contours. The object of observation, which "appears" to have a form, is sublimed into a metaphysical existence through its contours when it is made into a sculpture. Rilke called such works "Kunst-Ding" (things of art). The art object produced by Rilke is more solidly sustained and eternal than the metaphysical object. Rodin and the eternity of his art may be what Rilke meant by the word "alone" in his search. Mr. Nobunaga uses music to depict Rilke's emotional loneliness and madness, and how he eventually found salvation in art. It is an ambitious work that could be called a sound sculpture.

Hab' ein Lied auf den Lippen
The original poem "Hab' Sonne im Herzen" by Fleischlien is well-known as "Hab' Sonne im Herzen" translated by Yuzo Yamamoto. It is one of the most familiar German-language literary works in Japan, partly due to the existence of Yamamoto's children's book, "Let There Be Sunshine in Your Heart," which contains the poem. In Germany, too, the original poem seems to be a familiar text, displayed as a tapestry in the home or sung to a gentle melody. Of the three stanzas of the original poem, Nobunaga has woven the second stanza, beginning with "Let your lips have a song," directly into the piece as the German text. At the beginning of the piece, the German text is spun in a beautiful minor key. The Japanese text was translated by Nobunaga himself, and the free rearrangement of the three stanzas gives momentum to the message of "Have the sun in your heart" and "Have words for others," making it a powerful message. The motifs used throughout the piece remind us of the connection with the first piece. The melody of this piece is a grandiose yet modest prayer that one hopes will reach someone's heart as a distant tune.

References
Wo wir kunst der Wiebe vielen (Song for Mixed Chorus and Piano)" Takatomi Nobunaga, P2 (Ongaku no Tomo Sha, 2008) "Wo wir kunst der Wiebe vielen (Song for Male Chorus and Piano)" Takatomi Nobunaga, P2 (Ongaku no Tomo Sha, 2007) Bibliography
Hesse's Poems, translated by Kenji Takahashi (Shincho Bunko, 1950)
Hesse and Gundert," Yoshiaki Watanabe, HP
The Influence of Rodin's Art in Rilke's Poetry of Things," Keiko Funatsu (Kyoto Sangyo University, HUMANITIES SERIES No.52, 2019)